The Wandering Stag by Andrés Vega / VFX Artist

The Wandering Stag

This was my first approach to grooming in Houdini, a project done over a period of three weeks where I had to learn and create a personal project of realistic fur. 

This project started by choosing between a number of different animal options, each with their own unique animation.  I chose the stag since I have always found it to be a very captivating creature. 

Since the time was short, I decided to go easy on the environment and use the same grooming technique in order to add a grass field surrounding the stag. Some of the main references I used to create this project can be found in the series "The Crown", where they used a very detailed and realistic stag throughout a number of different scenes in one of their episodes. I used this as a starting point and tried to recreate the same wind effect on the fields as well as the texture colors of the stag itself.

I added a moving camera since I had to work around the way the animation was given, also, I wanted to maintain a final shot of the stag turning around one of the sides before it got startled.

Using Substance painter I was able to make a custom texture for the main body with color variations that could make the grooming more convincing when rendering. I also added an extra material shader to the nose, separate from the rest of the body, in order to give a more realistic look. The horns and the eyes were separate objects that I could shade accordingly.

The grooming was made through the use of guidelines, each originated from their own colored group, separating the body, neck, head, ears, eyelashes and whiskers. It was all then simulated with vellum in order to follow the model´s animation.

A similar process was followed when creating the grassfield, except that in this case, the simulation was separated between the grass that interacted with the stag and the grass that didn´t.

The final render was made using Redshift and the compositing with Nuke.